Overseas media plugging information gap in Pakistan

These are busy times for west London engineer Ghulam Mustafa. His website, Pakistan Politics, was set up in July after the first stand-off between President Pervez Musharraf and the judiciary.

But since the army general declared a state of emergency in Pakistan on Saturday, including severe restrictions on the country’s print and broadcast media, handling e-mail queries and updating the site has taken over his life.

“It’s more than a full-time job. Some nights I can’t sleep,” he told AFP by telephone Tuesday.

The site, http://pkpolitics.com had a modest 6,000 hits in its first four months. It has now passed the half-million mark after the weekend’s events, requiring Mustafa to get extra bandwidth to prevent the site crashing.

The BBC World Service radio’s Urdu section has upped its output from two hours a day to three and a half, its boss Mohammed Hanif told AFP.

Their 10-million-strong audience has also seen a “big surge,” including in Gulf states, where there are many expatriate Pakistani workers. And like satellite dishes, sales of short- and medium-wave radios have reportedly increased in Pakistan, he said, as locals clamour for hard fact instead of rumour.

Hanif likened the situation to the days when BBC World Service foreign language stations provided information to the Soviet bloc, although the Internet has become a new source of news since then. “People have been calling our offices every hour to get their hourly updates. They’re so used to 24/7 news channels that they come to expect something,” he said.

Like a number of independent Pakistani channels such as GEO TV or ARY One, pkpolitics.com contains video clips and streaming, as well as audio, for those without access to satellite television.

But the site has also become a forum for discussion and mobilising protest.

London, Wednesday, AFP